Effect Measure is a forum for progressive public health discussion and argument as well as a source of public health information from around the web that interests the Editor(s)

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Earth to Dr. Kiselyov, come in please . . .

Dr. Kiselyov is at it again. In August he was predicting the bird flu outbreak in Russia was subsiding and would be over with by late in that month.

"Things are quietening down. The (epidemic) will vanish in 10-15 days," Oleg Kiselyov, head of a research institute operating under the WHO's auspices, told reporters in Russia's second city of St Petersburg.

"It won't spread further because of changing weather conditions. It's never warm enough in Siberia in late August." (Reuters and here)

Whoops. Never mind. In December he said H5N1 wouldn't pose a threat to Russian citizens for at least another two years (Itar-Tass News Agency via Effect Measure).

Now this:

A senior Russian researcher said Thursday that the international campaign to address the threat of a bird flu pandemic was commercially motivated.

Oleg Kiselyov, director of the St. Petersburg-based Influenza Research Institute, told a Russian-Italian conference in the central Russian city of Veliky Novgorod: "Bird flu has become some kind of a commercial project. Panic, which has to a large extent been artificially fueled by the media, has led to an enormous increase in funds allocated for the production of vaccines in a record low period of time."

Kiselyov said that bird flu vaccines should certainly be created but that it was also very important to determine and address the sources of bird flu outbreaks. Experts have proven that the fatal human cases in China were caused by overpopulation and the uncontrolled contact between domestic and wild migrating birds in the country's water basins. (RIA Novosti)

So that's the explanation. Too many Chinese combined with too many birds combined with too many greedy capitalists.